Alcuin's Recreational Mathematics

Alcuin's Recreational Mathematics
Title Alcuin's Recreational Mathematics PDF eBook
Author Marcel Danesi
Publisher Oxford University Press
Pages 257
Release 2024-11-20
Genre Mathematics
ISBN 0198925328

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Propositiones ad acuendos juvenes (“Problems to Sharpen the Young”) is a ninth-century book written by medieval teacher and scholar Alcuin of York. Today, it has become one of the foundational texts in what is commonly called recreational mathematics. The book has been translated in many languages and analysed from various mathematical angles and perspectives, from contemporary arithmetic and geometry to the nature of sequences. It is not only a collection of ingenious and challenging puzzles, but the core ideas collected in this book have become major themes and branches of mathematics. Here, Marcel Danesi revisits all fifty-three problems in Alcuin's original text, providing detailed solutions and analyses. Alcuin's Recreational Mathematics examines the problems in the Propositiones in easy-to-follow language, extracting from them the notions and techniques that today constitute basic mathematics. Each chapter discusses Alcuin's problems more broadly, and ends with ten exploratory puzzles based on Alcuin's original problems and related themes. Answers and detailed solutions are included at the back. Alcuin's Recreational Mathematics demonstrates how Alcuin's Propositiones puts basic mathematical thinking on display via ingenious problems that often require outside-of-the-box thinking, constituting an original and imaginative investigation of mathematics in its essence.

Adventures In Recreational Mathematics (In 2 Volumes)

Adventures In Recreational Mathematics (In 2 Volumes)
Title Adventures In Recreational Mathematics (In 2 Volumes) PDF eBook
Author David Singmaster
Publisher World Scientific
Pages 494
Release 2021-09-21
Genre Mathematics
ISBN 9811251622

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David Singmaster believes in the presentation and teaching of mathematics as recreation. When the Rubik's Cube took off in 1978, based on thinly disguised mathematics, he became seriously interested in mathematical puzzles which would provide mental stimulation for students and professional mathematicians. He has not only published the standard mathematical solution for the Rubik's cube still in use today, but he has also become the de facto scribe and noted chronicler of the recreational mathematics puzzles themselves.Dr Singmaster is also an ongoing lecturer of recreational mathematics around the globe, a noted mechanical puzzle collector, owner of thousands of books related to recreational mathematical puzzles and the 'go to' source for the history of individual mathematical puzzles.This set of two books provides readers with an adventure into previously unknown origins of ancient puzzles, which could be traced back to their Medieval, Chinese, Arabic and Indian sources. The puzzles are fully described, many with illustrations, adding interest to their history and relevance to contemporary mathematical concepts. These are musings of a respected historian of recreational mathematics.

Essays on Early Medieval Mathematics

Essays on Early Medieval Mathematics
Title Essays on Early Medieval Mathematics PDF eBook
Author Menso Folkerts
Publisher Taylor & Francis
Pages 384
Release 2023-06-14
Genre History
ISBN 1000941361

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This book deals with the mathematics of the medieval West between ca. 500 and 1100, the period before the translations from Arabic and Greek had their impact. Four of the studies appear for the first time in English. Among the topics treated are: the Roman surveyors (agrimensores); recreational mathematics in the period of Bede and Alcuin; geometrical texts compiled in Corbie and Lorraine from Latin sources from late antiquity; the abacus at the time of Gerbert (pope Sylvester II.); and a board-game invented in the first half of the 11th century (the 'Rithmimachia') to help people to learn mathematics. Included in the volume are critical editions of several texts, e.g. that of Franco of Liège on squaring the circle, Bede and Alcuin on recreational mathematics, and part of Pseudo-Boethius' Geometry I. The book opens with a survey of mathematics in the Middle Ages, and ends with a history of Rithmimachia up to the 17th century, when the game fell into disuse.

Alcuin's Recreational Mathematics

Alcuin's Recreational Mathematics
Title Alcuin's Recreational Mathematics PDF eBook
Author Marcel Danesi
Publisher
Pages 0
Release 2024-11-20
Genre
ISBN 9780198925309

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From China to Paris

From China to Paris
Title From China to Paris PDF eBook
Author Yvonne Dold-Samplonius
Publisher Franz Steiner Verlag
Pages 486
Release 2002
Genre Mathematics
ISBN 9783515082235

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The reports of a conference of 11 scholars who began the task of examing together primary sources that might shed som elight on exactly how and in what fomrs mathematical problems, concepts, and techniques may have been transmitted between various civilizations, from antiquity down to the European Renaissance following more or less the legendary silk routes between China and Western Europe.

An Anthropology of Puzzles

An Anthropology of Puzzles
Title An Anthropology of Puzzles PDF eBook
Author Marcel Danesi
Publisher Routledge
Pages 232
Release 2020-05-15
Genre Social Science
ISBN 1000185508

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An Anthropology of Puzzles argues that the human brain is a "puzzling organ" which allows humans to literally solve their own problems of existence through puzzle format. Noting the presence of puzzles everywhere in everyday life, Marcel Danesi looks at puzzles in society since the dawn of history, showing how their presence has guided large sections of human history, from discoveries in mathematics to disquisitions in philosophy. Danesi examines the cognitive processes that are involved in puzzle making and solving, and connects them to the actual physical manifestations of classic puzzles. Building on a concept of puzzles as based on Jungian archetypes, such as the river crossing image, the path metaphor, and the journey, Danesi suggests this could be one way to understand the public fascination with puzzles. As well as drawing on underlying mental archetypes, the act of solving puzzles also provides an outlet to move beyond biological evolution, and Danesi shows that puzzles could be the product of the same basic neural mechanism that produces language and culture. Finally, Danesi explores how understanding puzzles can be a new way of understanding our human culture.

Insular Iconographies

Insular Iconographies
Title Insular Iconographies PDF eBook
Author Meg Boulton
Publisher Boydell & Brewer
Pages 280
Release 2019
Genre Art
ISBN 1783274115

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Essays on aspects of iconography as manifested in the material culture of medieval England.